


L-I-F-E G-O-E-S O-N

by mistakeshavebeenmade



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Multi, Polyamory, Trans Character, accidental home invasion, bossuet has terrible luck but it's all okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 10:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1684673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistakeshavebeenmade/pseuds/mistakeshavebeenmade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you've got more than money and sense, my friend<br/>you've got heart, and you're going your own way</p>
<p>(In which Bossuet drunkenly climbs in a window, falls in love twice, and gets adopted by his best friend's neighbors, more or less in that order.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	L-I-F-E G-O-E-S O-N

The first thing Bossuet noticed when he woke up was his headache. Which was probably to be expected, because the fuzzy memories that drifted into his mind from the night before included a frightening amount of alcohol. He was a little impressed, actually. Usually he didn’t get this spectacularly drunk on the nights when Grantaire didn't go out with them.  He was almost positive R hadn’t been there. Maybe he’d have some aspirin or something for a guy with a killer headache, though. He’d been in Bossuet’s shoes often enough that he ought to have a little sympathy.

Thing number two took a little while to sink into his awareness. He was still trying to process the mental image of someone giving Marius a lap dance when it occurred to him that Grantaire's couch had gotten a lot more comfortable since the last time he was here. And also it didn't seem to be corduroy any more, a cautious brush of fingers told him. Which was kind of weird. He thought Grantaire would at least  _tell_ him if he was going furniture shopping, even if he had a lifetime ban from actually helping his friend move furniture after the Wardrobe Incident. And R loved that godawful couch, or at least loved how much everyone else complained about it. Sometimes it was hard to tell with R.

After that realization, he managed to pry an eye open, and things three and four hit him one after another. Grantaire's couch had gotten more comfortable because it was, as it turned out, not Grantaire's hideously olive green corduroy couch that swam into bleary view under his nose, but a cheerful floral print. It wasn’t Grantaire's couch because, apparently, it also wasn’t Grantaire's apartment.

Well. Fuck.

The thing was, he was pretty sure he'd gotten into the apartment through an open kitchen window the night before.  Well. Mostly open. He'd had to pull the screen out before he could climb through. He was almost positive it was in one piece. Probably. Almost definitely probably in one piece. Which he should have found kind of strange, actually. His friend had taken his screens out months before, the first time Bossuet had locked himself out of his apartment and spent a miserable night sleeping on his fire escape because his super refused to answer the emergency line after 10 PM. And yeah, okay, maybe Éponine had a point and drunk him had needed a keeper because he had  _broken the fuck into some stranger's apartment the night before._ He closed his eyes again and groaned softly.

About that point, his brain helpfully supplied him with the information that the stranger in question had just set something down on a table next to his ear.

"If I keep my eyes closed, is there any chance we could pretend I didn't drunkenly break in and crash on your couch? And I could just go and leave you to file your restraining order in peace?"

The melodious laughter coming from somewhere on the other side of the room wasn't very promising.

Bossuet groaned again. It didn’t make his head feel any better, but it was the only reaction he could come up with. He raised his head enough to get a slightly fuzzy look at the goddess sitting in the armchair across from him.  Loose black curls framed a set of dark eyes and wide lips quirked upwards at the corners in faint amusement, and Bossuet could feel his mouth about to get away from him a few seconds too late to stop himself from saying “Oh crap you’re gorgeous, and that’s probably the last thing you want to hear from the hung-over home invader on your couch, but it’s true, and now I’m just going to gather the shreds of my dignity and any sobriety I might be able to find between here and the door and run away.”

It wasn’t until a laughing Grantaire turned up at his apartment a few hours later that he discovered he’d left his phone behind in his mad rush to get out of the apartment. By that point, however, he was a little too busy with taking his phone back and kicking his way-too-amused best friend out of his apartment to care.

* * *

It took nearly three days before Grantaire stopped bursting into raucous laughter every time he saw Bossuet, and Bossuet spent that time avoiding R’s building more than he had the one time he accidentally sat R’s stove on fire. (It had actually been less of an accident and more of a deliberate distraction that got a tiny bit out of hand, but he’d had trouble convincing anyone of that after the fact.)  The last thing he needed was to run into Grantaire’s unfairly attractive neighbor, especially since it was apparently  _neighbors,_ and there was the greatest tragedy of his life right there; out of all of the missed trains and stolen wallets and blown fuses and lost rent checks, he only regretted the fact that he’d met the love of his life while hung-over and accidentally waking up on her couch, and only after she’d found herself a datemate.

He was absorbed enough in his thoughts that, while he made it on time to class for once, he completely forgot about putting his phone on silent, and it took several minutes of the generic beeping noise going off for him to realize that his professor was glaring at him for a reason.  He flipped it off without bothering to pull it out, shooting Prof. Blondeau what he hoped was a remorseful look. It wasn’t easy, since Blondeau was kind of an ass, but he was already on his second strike with the man, and he couldn’t afford to get kicked out of his Torts class. (Although seriously, fuck torts. He kind of regretted saving Marius’s perfect attendance record over Blondeau and tort law.) He spent the rest of the class filling the margins of his sparse notes with cheerfully lopsided stick figures and wondering who was texting him.

Once class let out, he spent a few bewildered seconds standing in the hall, staring at the screen of his phone as it slowly powered on again. The thing was, he prided himself on his choices of personalized ringtones for his friends.  And Bossuet had never met someone who _wasn’t_ his friend, or at least hadn’t given his number to any of them, so this was beyond weird.  Did telemarketers get in touch with people by text now?  Except apparently the person _was_ in his contacts after all.

> Text from: Thing #1  
>  » you have a cute butt  
>  » subjectively speaking  
>  » i mean i’m not sure if that can be an objective thing???  
>  » is there a cute butt standard somewhere?  
>  » maybe they keep in in a vault with the kilogram  
>  » shit i’m really bad at this  
>  » shit shit shit that wasn’t supposed to send, accidentally turned on the voice texting on my phone?  
>  » please forget this ever happened  
>  » except for the cute butt part  
>  » don’t forget that bit

Bossuet was snorting with laughter as he typed a reply.

> Text to: Thing #1  
>  » u mean theres just like  
>  »a vault somewhere  
>  »w some dudes ass on a shelf  
>  » ~the ultimate ass~  
>  » actually p sure im friends w that dude  
>  »hes def an ass  
>  » also who is this?????  
>  » courf if u changed the #s in my phone so u can hit on me again I s2g we have talked abt this

He only had to wait a few seconds for the response.

> Text from: Thing #1  
>  » don’t know anyone named courf  
>  » sorry?  
>  » or maybe not sorry if you don’t want them hitting on you  
>  » also have class, but glad talk of the Ass Standard didn’t scare you away

Bossuet grinned the entire way back to his apartment, and spent the afternoon in the park when he discovered his keys weren’t in his backpack, rather than going to Grantaire’s.

* * *

There was a Thing #2 in his contacts as well, he learned that night when the sudden chiming of his phone caused him to drop a book on his head instead of putting it safely back on the topmost shelf it had come from.  While he was nursing the growing bump on his head, he traded cautious written ripostes about the previous week’s Game of Thrones and which character he would be, exactly.  (He’d be damned if he accepted Grey Worm even though the reasoning that both of them looked sexy as bald black dudes was kind of flattering, because  _hello,_ direwolves.)   He couldn’t find any names missing from his contacts, which pretty much crossed Courfeyrac-induced chaos off the list of things that could be going on.

He was definitely not worrying about the fact that with that option eliminated, there actually wasn’t anything left on the list. Instead, he fished for whoever Thing #2 was to tell him who they would be, hoping to get some kind of a clue about who he was texting.

> Text from: Thing #2  
>  » No contest.  
>  » A dragon.

Which…okay. Yeah. That was a little terrifying and Bossuet wasn’t going to pry any more.

* * *

Text to: Thing #2

> » ok srsly i hafta know who u r?????  
>  » its drivin me up the wall
> 
> Text from: Thing #2  
>  » Haven’t you figured it out?  
>  » Think hard, cielito.

His resolve not to pry had lasted all of about 48 hours, during which he’d chatted with Thing #1 about whether or not ghosts existed (the person he was texting was firmly in the ‘well I haven’t seen any proof that they _don’t_ exist’ camp, while Bossuet was strongly pro-ghost), flushed hot at a never-ending series of pet names from Thing #2 (who seemed to have settled on corazón for the moment, but had gone through enough Spanish in the process that he was leaving Google Translate open, just in case), and had needed to put his phone aside and just stare at the wall for an entire minute at 2 AM when the heartbreaking “you don’t actually have to humor me, I know I’m a little weird” had come through from Thing #1.

> Text to: Thing #1  
>  » ur amazing  
>  » srsly dude  
>  » wouldnt humor u
> 
> Text from: Thing #1  
>  » knew I liked you for a reason

It was just that he desperately needed to figure out who these people were and how their numbers were in his phone and whether  or not he could bundle both of them up under a blanket and hug them for a very long time.  He was getting attached to people he’d never met before, and this was probably a problem.

* * *

He was on his break at work when things finally started to make sense.

> Text to: Thing #1  
>  » all im sayin is ppl get way 2 in2 that shit  
>  » esp since it doesnt rlly matter whats in ur pants?  
>  » like unless were bonin its not my business??  
>  » u be u

He heard someone’s phone go off in the store, but didn’t think anything of it. A few moments later, his phone buzzed.

> Text from: Thing #2  
>  » how are you real  
>  » and can i keep you

“…much longer are we going to keep this up, _really_ , Chetta, he’s perfect and I want to bring him home with us, not just keep up this whatever this is, and someone’s got to be around in case he drops another book on his head and this isn’t _fair_.”  The voice grew more distinct as whoever was talking got closer to the back office, and Bossuet was forced to pay attention in case whoever it was decided to wander in here. There was a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY, but people tended to conveniently ignore it if they didn’t think they were getting enough help from whoever was still out front.

“Be patient, amor.” That voice, and its fond amusement, sounded vaguely familiar, and Bossuet started paying more attention. It wasn’t that he was a gossip, exactly, but if something was going on with someone he knew, he liked to know about it.  It was sort of a self-preservation thing. If he knew what was going on with his friends, he was less likely to be caught off-guard by an Enjolras-related fit of best friend melancholy, or one of Courfeyrac’s madcap schemes to set his roommate up with a nice partner, or one of Jehan’s fits of dramatic melancholy (that usually ended in someone calling campus security on them because anyone who burned that much incense had to be up to something).  “He’ll figure it out eventually.”  He _knew_ he knew that voice, but it was refusing to come to him. Maybe he could get a quick peak at them if he was sneaky about it?

“Sure, but eventually isn’t now, and I think I might actually be giving myself an ulcer from worrying, I was so nauseous earlier and I’ve barely been able to eat and my chest kind of hurts when I talk to him…although I suppose it could be _Heliobacter pylori_ , in fact it’s much more likely to be stomach bacteria, they cause 90% of ulcers, you know, so I should really get another upper GI study done, just to be on the safe-”

The cause of his abrupt pause was, naturally, Bossuet, who had forgotten in his attempt to eavesdrop more efficiently that the door to the back office was a little sticky, and had put a little more force into moving it before the conversationalists walked away than had actually been necessary. When the hinges finally gave way with a high-pitched squeak of protest, he’d been too caught up in his own momentum to keep from tumbling into the middle of their conversation.   He got a weird sense of déjà vu as he stared up at the two people he’d interrupted.  The guy on the left, the one with wide eyes set in a warm face, was only vaguely familiar, but the dark haired woman on the right only took him a few moments to place. He’d still been a little bit drunk the last time he’d seen her, but breaking into a person’s apartment wasn’t something you just forgot.

Before he could get anything out resembling an apology, he was being hauled to his feet and bustled back into the office by the dark skinned boy, who managed to be a lot stronger than he looked, a surprising feat considering that he was about five inches shorter than Bossuet and about half his weight.  He kept up a worried-sounding monolog as he grabbed the first aid kit off the wall and set to work, from which Bossuet managed to determine that he’d managed to whack his head pretty well on the door on his way out, which explained the faint dripping sensation on his cheek, and the fact that he was apparently in danger of getting gangrene and needing his head cut off to keep the rest of him from dying? That bit didn’t make a lot of sense to him, but he didn’t manage to get a word in edgewise to say so.

He set aside his bewilderment, and tuned back in to the steady stream of words.  “…pretty sure I’m getting it cleaned, but you should be careful and normally I’d tell you not to get shampoo in it, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. You look good bald, though, you have a really nice head. Is that a weird compliment? Chetta keeps talking to me about weird compliments, after the last time I mentioned her symmetrical nostrils, but I’m never sure exactly what’s weird and what isn’t and anyways having symmetrical nostrils is very evolutionarily beneficial. But keep it clean, and put butterfly sutures on it like this and you should be just fine, and I should probably go because my A&P prof told me I’m not allowed to use medical emergencies as an excuse for being late to tests any more and I really need to pick up a blue book but I hope your head feels better!”  He was heading out the door before Bossuet’s brain managed to goad his mouth into saying _something._

“Wait, hang on, who are you?”

The guy turned and smiled widely, exposing gap teeth and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Joly. You broke into my girlfriend’s apartment one time? Nice to meet you again.”  He was gone before Bossuet managed to string another sentence together.  His girlfriend, however, was still loitering outside the door. She gave him a critical once-over when he made it to the doorway, then favored him with a soft smile.

“I agree with him, for the record. Your head _is_ cute.”  And, following in her boyfriend’s footsteps, she managed to get away before he could put together a coherent response.  Was that going to be a thing now? Hot, taken strangers flirting with him and then walking away? He was not on board for that plan.

Except for how apparently he kind of was, because he didn’t stop smiling to himself for the rest of his shift.

By the time he got home, though, the wheels were spinning. Maybe his head hadn’t quite been clear enough to put things together earlier, but the texted conversations he’d been having dovetailed a little too neatly with the one he’d witnessed in person, and this really should have occurred to him a lot earlier because seriously, who else had been in possession of his phone for at least a few minutes before bringing it to their neighbor to give back to him?

* * *

Knowing who was texting him was one thing. Doing something about it, though? That was another thing completely.

Bossuet put his phone on silent after work and flopped down on his couch, supposedly studying but realistically staring vaguely at a figure summarizing the important dates relevant to the Constitution, considering his poor life choices.  Only they hadn’t really been poor life choices, had they? Because he’d managed to be his usual disaster-prone self and he still had Joly and Chetta flirting with him every time he turned around.  He wasn’t used to this kind of outcome, to be honest. He was used to things continuing to go wrong until he wound up having to move apartments, and possibly cities and maybe change his name and grow a beard.

And okay maybe he was being a little ridiculous, but Grantaire’s hot neighbors kept flirting with him…or lecturing him about diseases, which he thought might be Joly’s version of flirting. He felt like he was entitled to a little ridiculousness.

He continued his blank textbook-watching until the flashing message light on his phone caught his eye.

> Text from: Thing #2  
>  » Figured it out yet?  
>  » Because I have ten bucks on you showing up here before Jolllly gets out of his lab.

It took him all of five minutes of indecision before he was putting away his book and heading out the door.

* * *

By the time he arrived at Grantaire’s building and got buzzed in, he was freezing. As it turned out, impulsive decisions were great right up until a sudden thunderstorm blew up on the way across town, and he was more than a little soaked, which wasn’t exactly a great way to start a…whatever the hell this was going to be. He wasn’t entirely sure. Confrontation? Threesome? Probably both, knowing his luck.  If anyone could manage to ruin a threesome with a “we should talk” it would be him.

Chetta was standing in the hallway between her front door and Grantaire’s, looking smug. “Just in time. I knew you looked like someone who was putting things together earlier.”  She gave him a critical once-over, then took hold of his hand abruptly and pulled him into the apartment. “Shoes off. Joly’ll never forgive me if I make you stand around dripping, and as cute as he is, the pneumonia lecture is only endearing the first time.”

In short order, Bossuet found himself separated from his shoes and jacket, cocooned in a spectacularly hideous afghan, and deposited on the couch with instructions to “Stay put. I’m getting you a cup of tea.”  It really was an incredibly comfortable couch, floral or not, and he let himself sink back into the cushions for a moment, enjoying the comfort. Eventually, though, he had to say _something._

“Not that I don’t appreciate it and all, but why are you doing this? All of this?”

Chetta stuck her head out of the kitchen door. “Because you’re adorable when you’re confused, because I have a soft spot for boys I could probably bench press, because you climbed in my kitchen window and drunkenly talked my boyfriend out of a panic attack, take your pick.”  It was enough to stun Bossuet into silence, because _what?_ He felt like that was the kind of thing he ought to remember, not Marius’s incredibly awkward first lap dance.

He didn’t realize that Chetta had returned until he felt the couch dip next to him. She pressed a cup of tea into his hands silently, which he stared at wordlessly.  There was no processing this bizarre turn his life had taken, but Bossuet was very familiar with the bizarre and confusing twists of his fortunes, and hey, at least there was tea. A little bit of pleasant went a long way against a heaping dose of weird.  It wasn’t as sweet as he might have made it, but he’d take what he could get.  Once he’d burned his tongue a couple of times getting the tea to a drinkable temperature, he finally turned his gaze back to Chetta.  She was staring at him consideringly. “You don’t remember.” It wasn’t a question.

"If I say ‘remember what?’ it pretty much answers the question, right?"

Chetta re-crossed her legs, settling into her seat a little.  “So you probably don’t remember that I’m Musichetta and he’s Joly.”  Somehow the names fit perfectly. Musichetta was as beautiful as her name, and Joly as sweet as his, at least in looks.  “Or that Joly was having a bad dysphoria night…and it isn’t going to be an issue that we’re trans when you’re sober is it?”  Bossuet was shaking his head even before she finished the sentence, and she gave him a brilliant smile before continuing.

"I didn’t think so. Well, he has those kinds of nights, we both do, but he already gets worked up about things even when he’s having a good day…well, you’ve seen what he’s like. And it wasn’t a good day. We were making chocolate milk and Joly saw our milk was almost expired and wound up having a panic attack in the kitchen over the possibility of germs. He has emergency meds, and I went to get them, but by the time I found them and got back there was an adorable,drunk stranger hanging halfway through our window making him crack up with the worst puns I have ever heard in my life."

That…okay yeah that sounded exactly like him.  He was wonderful at puns, for a specific subset of wonderful defined as ‘everyone around me will be groaning in under ten seconds’.

"I think the only reason you came in was that Joly sort of looked like he might cry if you didn’t. It seemed like you were pretty set on getting to Grantaire’s place.  You tried to call him, by the way, but you couldn’t remember your phone passcode or his number, so I think you might have told the pizza delivery guy at Papa Nick’s that you weren’t going to crash on his couch because you were marrying his neighbors.  Then you set one of my potholders on fire, which I didn’t even know was _possible_  when we were making cold chocolate milk, kissed Joly twice, declared that you were keeping us forever and fell asleep on the couch.”  There was still a fond smile on her face when she’d finished.  It was weird. Usually he got exasperation, or maybe irritation, when he accidentally lit things on fire.

He was sort of getting the sense that nothing about his life was ever going to go the way he expected again. But then, it kind of hadn’t ever gone the way he expected before, and at least the future looked like it was going to offer a lot more of the pleasant sort of surprises than the other kind, so he wasn’t complaining.

Joly swept into the apartment before he had a chance to ask any questions like “so what exactly do the two of you want” or “did I offer to replace that potholder” or “what is this tea and can I move in and slash or be told where to buy a lifetime supply,” talking so quickly that Bossuet was sort of expecting cartoon speed lines to appear around his mouth.  He let the sound wash over him, since he had no idea what any of the scientific babble meant.  He only realized that it had stopped when the boy in question was halfway through launching himself towards the couch and Bossuet, who watched the teacup go spinning out of his hand as Joly collided with him with a sort of amused resignation.

The rest of the night could charitably be described as ‘organized chaos,’ but more accurately as just plain chaos.  As it turned out, his puns could still send Joly into hysterical laughter even when neither of them was blackout drunk or in the middle of a panic attack, and the combined force of his sheer bad luck and Joly’s hilarity-induced clumsiness ended in Musichetta chasing them both out of the kitchen, wielding a threatening wooden spoon.  As they sat on the floor outside the door, giggling conspiratorially and occasionally commenting on the progression of dinner, Bossuet found himself growing determined to keep this forever.

That night, he fell asleep in their too-small-for-three-people queen-sized bed to the low sound of Musichetta singing in the bathroom. There were probably still kinks to work out, but he couldn’t say he wasn’t looking forward to that.  Somewhere along the way ,endearments in a foreign language and in-depth lectures about bacteria and fond exasperation had started to feel like home.  He could put up with the worst luck in the world for that feeling.

**Author's Note:**

> L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. is the perfect Bossuet song and nobody can tell me otherwise.
> 
> For the incomparable Marie on the occasion of the anniversary of her birth because I have been tantalizing her with snippets of this for like a month now.
> 
> I've left things vague enough that you can kind of fill in your own preferred JMB headcanons but the faces/orientations I had in mind for this fic are as follows:  
> Bossuet: Owiso Odera, cis man, demisexual biromantic.  
> Musichetta: Felipa Tavares, trans woman, pansexual/romantic.  
> Joly: I'm so torn on Joly's FC but more or less like Ataui Deng, demiboy, bisexual greyromantic.
> 
> Come say hello on [Tumblr](http://sciencings.tumblr.com/)?


End file.
